MORGANTON, N.C. (Feb. 11, 2026) — So many things are happening right now, it’s as if this second week in February is the nexus of alternate universes. Take three seemingly unrelated events this week that are alike only in terms of spectacle:
The week started on Sunday with Super Bowl LX — an unremarkable football game whose two halves book-ended a most remarkable halftime show. Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s extravaganza was 13 minutes of cultural education.
On Tuesday, the Buddhist monks that Timberley and I have been walking with in spirit for the past two months reached Washington, D.C., on their 2,300-mile, 108-day Walk for Peace. They are there today and tomorrow before catching a bus in Annapolis, Md., for Fort Worth, Texas, where the peace walk began. I’ll write more about it next week.
And today is the start of Speedweek 2026 at Daytona International Speedway in Florida — a really, really big deal for folks who like stock car racing. They’ve had three months of nothin’ since the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway in Avondale, Ariz., last fall. The single-ring circus gears up again starting today.
Back in the 1990s when Dale Earnhardt was The Intimidator and won the last few of his record seven NASCAR Winston Cup championships, Timberley and I would regularly meet up with her dad, Nat Gilliam, at the races in either Darlington, S.C., or Rockingham, N.C. Nat worked with Earnhardt’s race team, representing one of its sponsors, Western Steer/Mom ‘n’ Pops, Inc., of Claremont, N.C. He even got us into the Daytona 500 once.
Now, I used to be a huge NASCAR fan, but no longer. Watching 41 grown men drive around in counterclockwise circles all afternoon, even at Daytona, seems like a waste of time. That makes the endless race analysis neither enlightening nor entertaining, especially now that retired driver Darrell Waltrip, my favorite color commentator, has also retired from doing Fox Sports coverage.
Maybe if half of the cars ran one direction and half the other? Now that might be a show worth watching. And there would probably be fewer wrecks. They’d have to slow down and learn how to pick their way through oncoming traffic to avoid head-on collisions. Otherwise, the whole race would be run under caution flags.
All 200 laps of this Sunday’s season-opening race — billed as the Super Bowl of Stock Car Racing — would then be breathtaking, as drivers would have to work with each other and stay in line, both literally and figuratively, in order to keep from crashing and being hauled to the garage. Taking risks would punish risk-takers for a change, instead of letting intimidators wreck everybody else.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s what we all need to do in our everyday lives — just take our time and try a bit harder to navigate our ways through the people with whom we come into contact, whether in person or some other way, like on social media. If we see someone getting out of line as they approach us, we can steer away from them and save ourselves as well as everyone drafting behind us.
However, the problem with my suggestion for improving interpersonal relations is the same one that most NASCAR drivers would encounter having to race more mindfully and less instinctively. There’s always somebody who won’t play by the rules or, at the very least, won’t cooperate with everyone else, whether on their own team or on ours. And you know how it goes. Some folks like wrecking things.
That’s what’s going on now in our nation’s capital. The current administration — and I use that noun advisedly — doesn’t want to cooperate with anyone, not even with reasonable Republicans, much less with any Democrats. The few people in power — a minority of extremists, not conservatives by any definition — want the mass of men, women, nonbinary individuals and children to shut up and do as we’re told. In fact, fascists prefer that we obey in advance, as the saying goes.
And stop using the term nonbinary, dammit! is what the administration would say about that last paragraph. How dare you be woke! Keep sleepwalking through your life. It’s easier for us to get away with stuff if you’re asleep or at least pretend to be.
Imagine NASCAR drivers not being awake — or woke, if grammar ain’t your thing — this Sunday at Daytona as they make their ways around that historic 2.5-mile tri-oval.
When Timberley and I attended the so-called Great American Race in 1993, we saw two things that have stayed with us ever since then — Hickory resident Dale Jarrett’s first Daytona 500 win (with his dad, Ned Jarrett, calling the race up in the CBS broadcast booth), but, earlier, Rusty Wallace’s horrific, barrel-rolling crash on the back stretch of the racetrack.
On Sunday, Feb. 14, 1993 — that’s right, Valentine’s Day — our seats were in the grandstand of Lockhart Tower near Turn 1. Somehow I happened to have my binoculars on the black No. 2 car, sponsored by Miller Genuine Draft. We were rooting for #3 Dale Earnhardt, but we’d always liked Rusty Wallace, even though he was from Missouri and drove a Pontiac.
When I saw Rusty’s Grand Prix spin sideways, lift into the air and then demolish itself first by flipping end over end, then by rolling over and over and over before coming to a stop in the grass on the back stretch, I thought I’d just seen a man lose his life. I was not thrilled to witness that event, even though it did break up the monotony of speedway racing. It was, again, horrific. And senseless.
But within minutes, the CBS announcers — veteran sportscaster Ken Squier and retired drivers Ned Jarrett and Neil Bonnett — told viewers that Rusty had survived the crash, and that he had told his crew, “I’m OK,” over his two-way radio as soon as the car came to rest in the grass. In the stands, Timberley and I didn’t know that good news until we saw the driver helped out of his pile of twisted metal and walked to an awaiting ambulance.
Almost exactly one year later on that very same track — on Feb. 11, 1994 — Neil Bonnett, who had come out of retirement the previous fall, died in a practice session for the ’94 Daytona 500. And on Feb. 18, 2001, Dale Earnhardt — our favorite driver and our connection to racing through Timberley’s dad (who had also worked with Neil Bonnett, I might add) — died in a crash at Daytona. You heard about that one, I imagine. That year, Timberley and I watched it on TV and could not believe it.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway is credited with saying, “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” I don’t know what ol’ Ernie thought about the politics of race or peace, but I think even he would have paid attention to a Puerto Rican rapper who was brave enough to take a racist bull by the horns and win the day; and to a group of Buddhist monks who climbed a veritable mountain for peace one step at a time through one of the coldest winters we’ve ever had as Americans — and I’m not just talking about the weather.
Otherwise, risking one’s life for sport is just macho bullshit, which, for some critics, sums up most of Hemingway’s novels. For me, his last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, is an exception, as it deals with loss and death from the perspective of an old man already dealing with failure. That short novel, by the way, is set in Cuba, where Hemingway, a boy from Chicago, spent much of his adult life. Hemingway loved Latin culture. His estate near Havana was called Finca Vigia, which means “Lookout Farm” in Spanish. His favorite drinks were Daiquiris and Mojitos, not all-American Budweiser beer.
Another Nobel Prize winner, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, describes our challenging times much better: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” I think about this poem — “The Second Coming” — often because it says so much about the different worlds through which we travel day by day.
While I don’t know what’s coming for us this weekend at Daytona, what came this past Sunday in Palo Alto and then yesterday in D.C. were hopeful arrivals, but only if we welcome them and take what they have to share into our hearts. After all, this Saturday is Valentine’s Day.
After one full year — or 10 years — of hate, it’s past time to give peace more than just a chance. We need to pursue it, not sing “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Loose Wheel” as we watch things fall apart.
So buckle up, buttercup. Check your rear-view mirror when you need to and always watch out for cars on the road ahead. But keep both hands firmly on the wheel and your right foot hard on the gas.